American actor Johnny Depp, described as a violent husband with his ex-wife Amber Heard by The Sun in 2018, has lost his defamation suit against that British tabloid that, according to the judge, wrote something “substantially true.” “The defendants have shown that what they published, in the sense that their words have as I understand it, was substantially true,” London judge Andrew Nicol ruled yesterday when announcing his verdict in this highly mediatic case. The process, held in July before the High Court in London, revolved around an April 2018 headline in which The Sun wondered how British writer JK Rowling could accept this “wife beater” in the film Fantastic Beasts. During the three weeks of hearings, Depp made an effort to prove that he had never hit Heard despite the violent relationship between the couple, briefly married from 2015 to 2017. The 57-year-old protagonist of Pirates of the Caribbean, assured that the phrase written by the English newspaper had changed his image in Hollywood, endangering his career. “At the level of Weinstein” Depp was “mentioned on the same level as the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein”, convicted in March in the United States of sex crimes, went so far as to affirm the lawyer of the star, David Sherborne. For this reason, he sued the publishing group News Group Newspapers (NGN) and its executive director, Dan Wootton, to wash a reputation that can now be further sunk by this court decision. Johnny Depp was going to reprise next year the role of the evil Gellert Grindelwad in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a spinoff from the magical universe of Harry Potter. But this case has cast doubt on his participation in the film.NGN defended that it was based on 14 alleged cases of abuse from Depp to Heard, which it detailed in great detail during the process and which seemed to convince the judge. The largest defamation lawsuit “I have reached these conclusions after having examined in detail the 14 incidents on which the defendants relied, as well as the general considerations presented by the plaintiff,” Nicol wrote. The case, called “the largest libel trial of the 21st century in England”, exposed the dirtiest rags of the tumultuous marriage between Depp and Heard, exposing their intimacy and extravagant lifestyle in full view. The court heard lurid stories of drug abuse, feces in the marriage bed, suspicions of infidelity and a severed finger with a bottle during a violent fight. Acknowledging abusing drugs and alcohol, the actor said during the trial that in his years of marriage with Heard he used drugs so much that he was “in no condition” to hurt the 34-year-old model and movie star. And that he had never laid his hand on a woman, a claim supported by the written testimonies of his ex-partners Vanessa Paradis and Winona Ryder. Depp met the actress from The Danish Girl and Aquaman on the set of Diario de un seductor (The Rum Diaries in Spain) in 2011 and they were married in February 2015 in Los Angeles. They divorced two years later. The actress then spoke of “years” of “physical and psychological” violence, accusations that Johnny Depp vehemently denied. During the trial in London, Depp’s lawyer made an effort to present the actress as the true violent of the couple.And he accused her of being a “compulsive liar” who had fabricated a case against Depp for years to boost his career.
